HALLO AND GOODBYE
Jean de Chas* Inaugurates
the Beckett Bridge**
Never a one to
miss a lack of opportunity, I name it The Unnameable. Not like
the L’Inconnu, the body that is unclaimable, or the notional self fished
out by Bishop Berkeley. It is more concrete, and has steel in its soul.
Some people say
Becket’s middle name, Barclay, was a misspelling by the town clerk. Though it
proved prescient. Sam was no stranger to bars all his life, and Joyce’s clay
was never far from the surface in his work (1). And a mercy too, as after a
youthful flirtation, he shied away from a philosophy where you had to be seen
to exist, preferring to linger between nowhere and knowhere, worrying the
unspeakable (2).
A lot of dirty
water has passed under O’Connell’s Bridge since Beckett wrote ‘Harry Sinclair
is slowly taking the form of a garrulous turd’ (3), but he stood by his
half-uncle as a character witness in the trial of Oliver St John Gogarty for
libellous verses in As I Was Going Down Sackfield Street. Sam was made a
laughing stock by the defence lawyer. At thirty-one he finally turned his back
on his mother, Dublin and Ireland, in that order.
My poem to launch
the bridge has abandoned me (4). So I must content myself with a precipitate
(5):
The harp that
once
your mother sang.
Play it again,
Sam.***
Newsflash:
Gardai seek identity of man wearing two plastic rosaries, one blue, one
red, around his neck, and with no dental work, who came to the surface
as the Beckett Bridge was being moved into place. A spokesmen said it
is highly probable that he was 'a knight of the road'.
* An unknown author SB wrote about.
**Across the Liffey somewhere between Talbot and
O’Casey bridges. The design is a unilever harp.
*** For when ships pass in the night.
(1) Clay: the soil of Eden until the Fall when it was
contaminated by oil. Shakespeare referred to it as ‘the toughe cleyes of
Babilon called bitumen’. It was used as mortar in building the Tower of Babel,
which is why it was popularly nicknamed ‘jews’ pitch’. The French phrase ‘mordre
le bitume’ does not translate into ‘biting the dust’. ‘Sur le bitume’
is the French for being on skid row. Or a blackout.
(2) See SB’s translation of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau
Ivre (The Drunken Boat).
(3) Letters, 9 May 1931.
(4) Twang
It could be worstward ho, when all’s considered.
But there’s no ‘under it’ for down-and-outs,
save the blotches of doomed yellow in the pit (6)
going with the flow of traffic into
the snot green sea (7). Vagrants must lean
over
without being sorely tempted to jump off.
When the Liffey winds are favourable
the mortifying chains of Matt Talbot
rattle their corsetry downstream. Upwards, still,
Sean O’Casey’s cock-a-doodle-dandy
first thing in the morning could well give cause
to temperamental incontinence (8).
But as the body’s span swings itself up,
and the long arm two-fingers the harp strings
you’re passing a remark (9), ‘Open, c’est
Sam.’
(5) SB wanted the title of the title of Echo Bones
changed from
Echo Bones and Other Poems
to Other Precipitates (‘C’est plus modeste’, he told the
publisher Reavey).
(6) From SB’s ‘Enueg
(7) Dublin Bay (from James Joyce’s Ulysses).
(8) Urinary
incontinence is when you forget to piss until it’s too late. Temperamental
incontinence is when you forget to lose your temper.
(9) From
SB’s story, ‘The End’.
The Last Showman
For Kevin
Hough
The end of the
world is nigh.
That’s difficult
to deny.
I’d give it a
million years.
That’s a lot of
blood and tears,
and, no doubt,
some crumbs of love.
But Kevin Hough’s
had enough.
Who is left to
fill the shoes
of showbiz kings
like Jack Cruise,
Noel Purcell,
James N. Healy,
Josef Locke, the
Derry Gigli?
There’s no one I
can think of,
now Kevin Hough’s
had enough.
The end of an
era’s cause
for nostalgia,
gives pause
to remember that
the past
in its entirety
must last
on the great Bill
Board Above
for eternity.
Kevin Hough
has had enough,
but the light
of his star on
Gala night
keeps coming long
after he
added spice to
Variety.
It doesn’t just
depend on us.
So sparkle still,
Kevin Hough.
Wince
Dear Clement
Freud of the mellow wit,
you lost your
well-tempered clavichord
when a state
school joker slogged a quince
from your garden
by climbing the gate.
And you behaved
like a total shit.
Squad cars don’t
come of their own accord
to rough up a
scruff, who didn’t flinch
in court in front
of the magistrate.
‘I’ve never seen
such a fruit like it,
except it’s fat,
fucken owner, m’lord.’
The law came down
hard. And a spiked fence
went up. No more
opening the school fête.